MIKE HALLOWELL: Smelt Like Tyne Spirit

Brilliant! Great, eh? Spiffing! Amazing! Smelt are back in the River Tyne! I couldn't believe it! Good old smelt!

Mind you, I didn't know exactly what a smelt was, but its great to have them back anyway. Smelt and chips! Fried smelt and onions!

Seemingly, at one time the River Tyne was filled with smelt, had smelt coming out of its ear holes. Then they took the hump at the pollution and went somewhere else. Probably the Wear. But now they're back, and we Geordies have something to sing about.

Apparently, officers from the Environment Agency – God bless 'em, I say – had a quick plodge in the river to see if there were any other Swimming Things in the water other than salmon, dolphins and the odd leviathan or two. And indeedy-doody there was – bucketfuls of smelt.

Now the smelt is a funny old fish. It's not economy-sized – only reaching 25cm on a good day, apparently – and has a nice silvery set of scales. However, the interesting thing is that vegetarians and vegans can eat smelt without getting a guilty conscience. Why? I hear you ask, pray tell me!

Well, it's like this. The smelt looks like an ordinary fish, but is most peculiar in as much as it smells distinctly like cucumber (seriously). This means that if vegetarians and vegans shut their eyes they can pretend that they're actually eating cucumber and delude themselves into thinking that its okay. Now I'm the first to admit that there are one or two minor flaws with this theory, the main one being that the smelt is not really a cucumber, but a fish. To get around this difficulty I am going to propose that we reclassify the smelt taxonomically as a vegetable. Let's face it, it wouldn't be the first time.

Take the Chinese, for instance. (On second thoughts, don't take them; there are bloody millions of them and in any case where would we put them?). The Chinese eat this thing called a sea cucumber, which is an echinoderm of the Holothuroidea class. It's actually a slug-type thingie, but if zillions of Chinese people call it a cucumber then they can't all be wrong, can they? The Chinese also eat this delicious stuff called crispy seaweed. Except that it's not seaweed. Its cabbage. Or sometimes lettuce.

My point is that if we can call all these other things something they're not then why can't we do it with the smelt? My mate smelt a smelt (sorry) once, and he reckons that it really does smell like cucumber. However, to differentiate between smelt and, say, a sea cucumber we need to call it something else. I was thinking of something like a Sea Onion, a Sea Croissant or a Sea Cheesecake. It's not very conventional, admittedly, but it is creative.

Anyway, whatever the reason for their departure the smelt are now back in the Tyne, cucumber fragrance and all. I'd be interested to hear of any other animals that are called things that they're not, like the sea lion, which doesn't look like a lion at all to me, although it does look unnervingly like my paternal great-grandfather. I think this is probably just a coincidence, though, as you'll see by the photograph that accompanies this blog.